Scotland Yard to examine Bhutto slaying

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf announced Wednesday that Pakistan had invited Scotland Yard to help investigate the killing of Benazir Bhutto.

In his first major address to the nation since Bhutto was slain last Thursday, the Pakistani leader also defended the decision to delay by six weeks parliamentary elections that were to have taken place next Tuesday. Rioting in the wake of the Bhutto assassination, he said, had left the security situation too precarious to proceed as scheduled.

Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup, stepped down as army chief in November and took office as a civilian president. But pro-democracy critics remain angry about his six-week-long imposition of emergency rule that ended in mid-December.

The assassination of Bhutto, an opposition leader and former prime minister, generated a new wave of fury against Musharraf, already unpopular among Pakistanis at the time of the killings.

Musharraf refrained from repeating the much-derided contention made by his Interior Ministry last week that Bhutto had died from a skull fracture suffered when, propelled by the force of the suicide bomb, she struck her head on the lever of the sunroof.

Scotland Yard said in a statement that it was dispatching a small team that would leave for Pakistan by week's end.